The Designer’s guide to Roadmap planning
Picture this: You’re a product designer in a busy squad, working hard on the user problems you’ve prioritised this quarter. You’re focussed on the problems you’re solving now, but what will you work on next quarter?
Designers often don’t get a seat at the table when it comes to roadmap planning. Sometimes we might feel that this kind of strategy is best left to Product Managers. In reality, designers have a powerful contribution to make to planning the roadmaps for our annual goals.
What can you, as a designer, do to help your squad start Day 1 of next quarter with a prioritised, user-centric backlog? How can you do all of the above on top of all the work you’re already doing this quarter?
In this article I’ll give you a practical guide to help get this done. I’ll show you an example Financial Quarter, broken down into 3 months, with exactly how we do Continuous Discovery and plan ahead for next Quarter:
Month 1: Pick your Big Bets.
Month 2: Get granular with your opportunities.
Month 3: Refine, plan and organise.
I’ll focus on the activities done by the PM and Designer, as brighter minds than mine can best describe the work done by our comrades in Front End, Back End and QA.
A small note:
This technique worked really well for us to prep for improving an existing product area. If you’re developing something from scratch, these activities might look a little different.
Month 1: Pick your Big Bets.
Start your engines
Check in with your Tribe’s annual goal. Engrave it into your brain.
The First Workshop
Gather the Dream Team of squad leadership (Product Management, Agile Enablement, Tech Leads, Design) into a workshop. Breathe deeply. Open your PostIts.
Start with that Annual Goal. Throw some ideas around. Write a shortlist of the posisble themes/bets/problems you can work on next Quarter to best drive your overall goal. Don’t worry too much about impact or feasibility at this stage.
A few likely candidates should start to emerge.
Do your homework
Split up and start to size these opportunities in whatever way makes sense for your squad. For us, that’s a two-pronged approach:
- Our courageous PM Emmie consults our Business Data in Looker to size the business value of these opportunities.
- Our Product Designer (me!) consults Contentsquare (our Behavioural Data Oracle of choice) to roughly size how well each of these areas is working for our users.
Use the claculation below to compare exit rates with pageviews to find high traffic areas with high user problems:
Opportunity Score = (Pageviews * Exit Rate) / 10000
Higher = Bigger opportunity!
Circle the Agile wagons
Consult the whole squad and tell them what you’ve learned. Get their feedback on the technical viability of your potential Big Bets.
Look outside the squad. Touch base with any stakeholders that might be impacted. Plant the seed and sound out anything that would kill your ideas dead in the water.
Lock it in
Choose a theme or product area that you feel is the biggest opportinity you have next Quarter to push your Annual Goal. This should be quite high-level at this stage (eg. a few key pages of your site, a high-level user problem or metric).
Get any Tribe-level agreement you need to. Exhale.
Month 2: Get granular with your opportunities.
All hail the MegaBoard
Now you’ve picked your horse for next Q, it’s time to get granular. This month, focus on gathering as many ideas as possible.
Start to form the MegaBoard. Capture it in Miro, FigJam, or scrawl it on the walls of your rental apartment. Just create a central place where you and your team can dump all the ideas you’ll find this month.
Double check your data
Do a deeper dive into Contentsquare (or your analytics tool du choix) and get granular with the user problems you spot. Where are people struggling? Where are they dropping out? Capture all of this in stickies.
Dive again into the business data — which elements of this work might yield the biggest returns for the business?
Turn your mind to user research. What do you have already? What research can you launch now to get a sense of your user problems? If you’re lucky enough to have User Research resource, get some help.
Competitor analysis, market trends. How are other people solving this same problem?
Utilise the HiveMind
Work with your squad. Get together for Bug Hunts and UX review workshops where you go through your current product and harvest all the fruit (low-hanging or otherwise).
After all of these activities, you should have a Miro board so large you need to carry a ball of string to stop you getting eaten by Minotaurs. Looking at it all might make you feel slightly ill but take courage, more is definitely better at this stage.
Month 3: Refine, plan and organise.
Now you, your courage and your massive pile of stickynotes can step boldly into Month 3.
Finalise your exact goals
Tighten up the specifics of your squad’s goals for next Quarter. Get those signed off and make your Agile Enablement team swell with pride.
Do your homework. Again.
Check back in with Contentsquare. Get your most up-to-date numbers. Look at the areas your ideas cover. Search again for traffic volumes and exit rates on all of your key pages, calculate their Opportunity Scores. This is your data homework. You’ll need to bring this with you for the Main Event this month.
The Main Event: Quarterly Planning Day
Get the same gang from the start of the Q together again. Product Management, Tech Lead, Agile, Design. Clear your calendars for an entire day. Slack notifications off.
Open your massive board of Stickie ideas. Steel yourselves.
Here’s how it goes:
- Create a messy table with rows for each sprint of the upcoming Quarter.
- Go through every single idea on your board:
Cross-reference with the data homework you did to find out how big each opportunity might be. Ask yourself, could your Devs start working on this idea right now? Jot down any high-level technical dependencies if not.
3. As you talk, start populating your sprint board:
Start with the most valuable ideas (and the ones you’re able to start on right away) in the first sprints. Shuffle things around as you lay down your ideas. Bin any ideas that don’t seem to be valuable. Park those ideas that you don’t think you’ll get to next Quarter.
Don’t spend too much time on each one — you’re not trying to totally refine them. You’re just trying to get a rough idea of the order.
Keep going until you’ve gone through every single idea.
What’s the result?
You should have a table of sprints, heavily populated at the start of the Quarter and looser and less full as time goes on. This is important because things will change, curveballs will come, timelines will shift.
And just like that, you’ve got a backlog. Prioritised, data-informed and user-focussed. Hold this plan loosely but don’t lose sight of it. Check back in with this board every time you do sprint planning to readjust, tick things off and make sure you’re on track as you move through the quarter.
Start the first day of the new Quarter safe in the knowledge you’ve done everything you can to solve the user problems that will help you smash your annual goal.
Brace yourself to duck when the first curveball drops in week one.
